1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to providing typological and contextual information about a place derived from wireless beacon properties.
2. Description of Related Art
Reverse geocoding makes use of the geospatial information associated with a point in space to determine specific typological and contextual information such as the civic address of a latitude and longitude pair. Reverse geocoding relates to the process of back (reverse) coding of a point location (latitude, longitude) to a readable address or place name. It has also traditionally been defined as “the process of deriving the location of the nearest road segment to a point with the specified longitude/latitude.” Given an arbitrary point, the challenge is to return typological and contextual attributes associated with that point in space. Traditionally this has been focused on resolving street address information which could then be used for tasks such as navigation planning. As location-based services have become more varied and widely adopted, additional uses for reverse geocoding have come into existence. For example, there are now services from vendors such as GeoNames, Microsoft's Bing and CloudMade that offer the ability to find the closest intersection or the Wikipedia entries for items close to the geographic point. Traditional reverse geocoding services operate by executing a spatial search on information within a specialized database containing place names and street address information. Based on proximity, the most appropriate address/name is chosen. This works well for certain uses of reverse geocoding. However, there are a number of capabilities that existing models fails to achieve.
In particular, current models for reverse geocoding are not reliable for determining, for example, whether a point is located in the building or outside, or on which floor or in which specific room. Additionally, differentiating between several entities with a single civic address is a challenge for traditional reverse geocoding systems. Also, reverse geocoding systems rely on the latitude and longitude of a point, excluding the possibility of determining information about a place that changes in time or in physical space.
An example of a previous location system, the Cricket Indoor Location System, implemented a method by which arbitrary character strings were emitted as part of the beacon for the specially built hardware used by the Cricket System. These arbitrary character strings could be used to encode location and context information about each beacon. However, this “location” information requires an understanding of context and meaning that is encoded in the character string and is limited to small-scale deployments within a building.
The Cricket system relies on non-standard hardware and communications protocols. In addition, the information that is broadcast to all clients must be maintained within the configuration of each beacon. Lastly, this method relies on the ability of each client device to be able to interpret and determine the context of the broadcast character string to determine its meaning.
Another reverse geocoding prior art system is described in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2007/0191029. This patent publication describes an enhancement to what they refer to as “conventional reverse geocoding” in which additional capabilities are provided through the use of accuracy measurements as well as geospatial bounding areas to provide better accuracy in determining the appropriate response for a given request. This method is tangential to the present invention in that both methods can be used to improve the accuracy and specificity of reverse geocoding information for a given request.
The present invention overcomes current shortcomings in existing positioning and reverse geocoding systems. For example, according to embodiments of the present invention, methods and systems can indicate, for example, the particular building floor and room a device or user is located at. According to alternative embodiments, the invention discloses systems and methods that can identify an exhibit or an aisle to which a user is positioned closest.
The present invention provides geocoding capabilities for indoor positioning scenarios, as well as outdoor positioning scenarios. For example, according to embodiments of the present invention, systems and methods can indicate what section of a park a person is in, what neighborhood or area of a campus a person is currently in, or what specific part of a large moving vehicle, such as a ship or a train a person is located in.
The scenarios discussed above are merely illustrative. Numerous other scenarios could be imagined for using an arbitrary set of tags to identify useful information based on the described system.